Preview: Medal of Honor multiplayer

Not content to not have a modern shooter where you’re fighting brown-skinned terrorists in the Middle East, Electronic Arts resurrected the Medal of Honor franchise, adding familiar twists and lots of beards.

The closed beta – available now on PC and PS3, 360 version coming soon – features two maps and two gametypes, each offering a slightly different take than what you might be used to from other contemporary headshot galleries.

Team Deathmatch needs no explanation. Instead of fighting to reach a kill count however, players are out to reach a score limit, similar to Battlefield Bad Company 2. Yeah, I know it sounds similar, but it isn’t. A kill can net you anywhere from five points for an assist to twenty points for a kill (10 points) combined with a headshot (5 points) and a revenge or savior kill (5 points apiece). String enough of these together without dying yourself and you’ll earn temporary bonuses for your team like flak jackets which increase the amount of damage you can take before expiring or larger ammo clips.

DICE / Electronic Arts

Somehow, my mute teammates unlocked artillery strikes too, but I doubt I’ll ever get to do that myself.

Nestled in the lower-right corner of the screen, just above the ammo and grenade counts is another counter displaying your progress toward a kill-chain bonus. This makes it that much more frustrating for unskilled players like myself who are within five points of unlocking something when they’re gunned down by the likes of Milf_Pwner14.

Other than that, team deathmatch plays out very similar to how you would expect. The map currently available in the beta is the mid-sized, bombed out, Kabul City. Once again, DICE’s Frostbite engine’s ability to render jaw-droppingly gorgeous places to kill people in is on display with destructible buildings and real-time lighting and shadowing that make it hard to not stop and take a look around at just where the banner who’s shadow you see waving on the ground actually is. And then Milf_Pwner14 knifes you from behind. Or he fires an RPG at the wall you’re standing behind, blasting a hole through it and follows up by unloading a clip from his pistol into your face.

DICE / Electronic Arts

Of the three available classes – rifleman, special ops, sniper – I spent most of my time playing as the spec ops class. The medium range AK-47 combined with an RPG as my special weapon just worked for me. Much like it’s Activision competition, as you kill people and gain experience in MOH you progress through a ranking system, unlocking new gear and weapon add-ons. Unlike its competition however, these guns both feel and sound heavy and powerful, akin to those found in Battlefield Bad Company 2 -- the AK-47 isn’t a peashooter.

While I was playing, I couldn’t shake the desire to tag enemies, though. What’s tagging? Well, BFBC2 (also developed by DICE) let you sweep the field and mark any enemies you saw so your teammates could see them, too. If you couldn’t snag that kill, at least your sniper buddy could. With how hard it is to discern enemies from the environment in the beta, this would have been an awesome implementation. Additionally, it also gave me a sense of progress and made me feel like I was at least accomplishing something in between deaths, adding to the overall benefit of working together as a team. I know they’re two different games, but tagging is something DICE should put in every shooter from now on.

DICE / Electronic Arts

Speaking of which, you’re better off sticking with a small group of guys because lone wolves quickly perish in the streets of Kabul. Moving together means that you’re better equipped to handle encountering a cluster of enemies, and if your three buddies get killed, you can rack up major savior points for eliminating the instruments of their demise.

The objective based gametype has the American team fighting through checkpoints in order to take down the anti-aircraft emplacements to gain air superiority over a largely open, rural map dotted with choke points. It feels a lot like Siege mode from BFBC2, but instead of simply pushing the enemy back you’re dismantling roadblocks so a tank can pass through, eliminating machine gun emplacements so infantry can progress, and ultimately taking out the anti-aircraft emplacements. Playing as the Taliban simply tasks you with defending each of these hard points.

EA and DICE have a lot of work to do before the game ships in October, though. Right now headshots seem extremely plentiful, it’s not uncommon to spawn right in front of an enemy, and most glaringly there’s a nasty half a second of lag just before seeing a kill-screen – effectively, you know when you’re dead before you’re even dead. Other issues like my weapon loadout not saving along with menu settings like screen positioning, Y-axis inversion and sensitivity not saving were annoying as well.

DICE has a ton of experience and is one of the most respected developers of online shooters, so I’m sure they’ll have these issues fixed by the time the game ships. For now I’m going back to Battlefield Bad Company 2, though.

And now for something completely different

I was incredibly skeptical after reading in Game Informer earlier this year that EA was taking my belovedDead Space in a new, action oriented direction with it's sequel. But, after seeing this trailer from E3 I can definitely say DO WANT.

Are you playing the Medal of Honor beta? Let me know what you think by shooting me an e-mail, I'll pass it on to the developers.